Individual-1: “Under this administration, the Great Betrayal is over – America is NOT for sale!”
Rupp Arena holds 23,000, not even 50% full.
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WATCH: At Pres. Trump’s campaign rally in Kentucky, Sen. Paul claims that âÂÂwe now know the name of the whistleblower” and calls on the media to “print his name,” the latest example of President Trump or a Trump ally pushing to out the whistleblower, despite legal protections. pic.twitter.com/9yUxgfnyB7
I love that Trump rally attendees are wearing ‘Read the Transcript!’ shirts when the transcript – which isn’t actually a transcript – totally implicates the president in attempted extortion.
Trump continues to love the ceremonial aspects of demagoguery and ignores the policy implications of actual governance because predatory capitalism abhors a democracy.
As the talks stalled later that night, Trump’s exasperation with the hemming and hawing of members escalated and he delivered an ultimatum: Go ahead with the vote no matter what on Friday, he said, all but daring fellow Republicans to vote against his first significant bill.
The president was finished negotiating, and his thinking was straight from “The Art of the Deal”: If the White House continued to postpone the vote, the holdouts would gain leverage and learn the dangerous lesson that they could challenge Trump and win. Lawmakers wanting to oppose the president would have to do so publicly, in a vote, and face the consequences.
Yet in the end, Trump acquiesced to the preferences of House leaders, who did not want their members voting on a controversial measure if the outcome were in doubt. Realizing the health-care plan did not have the support to pass, Trump and Ryan decided Friday afternoon to pull the bill — news Trump announced in a phone call with The Post, before Ryan even had time to personally brief GOP members…
Mark Meadows (R-NC) said his mantra in negotiating with Trump had been, “If this was about personalities, we’d already be at ‘yes.’ He’s charming, and anyone who spends time with him knows that. But this is about policy, and we’re not going to make it about anything else.”
For Meadows, a sticking point was essential health-benefit requirements under the current law for insurance companies, such as maternity and newborn care, and substance-abuse treatment, which he wanted removed and replaced with narrower rules.
Meadows and other Freedom Caucus members met with Trump and Pence at the White House on Thursday, but they left without a deal, even after Trump had worked with them for weeks — leaving Trump’s advisers exasperated with the ornery bloc.
Manu Jain, head of Xiaomi India, announced that the company sold over two million smartphones in the Indian market during the third quarter of 2016.
This two million number represents a year-on-year increase of 150%. In October 2016, Xiaomi says it sold over one million smartphones in India within 18 days.
Xiaomi’s CEO Lei Jun also said that the company sold 100,000 Hongmi Note 3 phones in the Indian market within six months. According to statistics from the market research firm IDC, Xiaomi has become the third largest smartphone manufacturer among the 30 major cities of India, with 8.4% market share.
Xiaomi’s fast growth in India is attributed to its offline retail channel expansion and cooperation with more retail websites. The Chinese smartphone maker is selling products via the three major retail websites in India, which are Flipkart, Amazon, and Snapdeal.
Xiaomi’s target customers in India are people who desire inexpensive smartphones, and low price is the selling point of its Hongmi series products.
The Apache Spark processing engine is often paired with Hadoop, helping users to accelerate analysis of data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System. But Spark can also be used as a standalone big data platform. That’s the case at online marketing and advertising services provider Sellpoints Inc. — and it likely wouldn’t be possible without the technology’s Spark SQL module.
Sellpoints initially used a combination of Hadoop and Spark via a cloud-based managed service to process data on the Web activities of consumers for analysis by its business intelligence (BI) and data science teams. But in early 2015, the Emeryville, Calif., company converted solely to a Spark system from Databricks, also in the cloud, to streamline its architecture and reduce technical support issues.
Benny Blum, vice president of product and data at Sellpoints, said the analysts there use a mix of Spark SQL and the Scala language to set up extract, transform and load (ETL) processes for turning the raw data into usable information that can help the company target ads and marketing campaigns to individual website visitors for its corporate clients.
The BI team in particular leans heavily on Spark SQL, since it doesn’t require the same level of technical skills as Scala does. Some BI analysts do all of their ETL programming with the SQL on Spark technology, according to Blum.
“Spark SQL is really an enabler for someone who’s less technical to work with Spark,” he said. “If we didn’t have it, a platform like Databricks wouldn’t be as viable for our organization, because we’d have a lot more reliance on the data science and engineering teams to do all of the work.”
Sellpoints collects hundreds of millions of data points from website logs on a daily basis, amounting to a couple terabytes per month. Blum said the raw data is streamed into an Amazon Simple Storage Service data store and then run through the ETL routines in Spark to cleanse it and convert it into more understandable metrics-based formats. Spark also translates the data for output to Tableau’s BI software, which is used to build reports and data visualizations for the company’s customers.
At this point, Blum said, Spark SQL isn’t a perfect match for the standard SQL that has long served as the primary programming language for mainstream relational databases. “There are certain commands that I expect to be there that aren’t there, or may be there, but under a different name,” he noted. Despite such kinks, though, Blum thinks the Spark variant is familiar enough for SQL-savvy users to get the job done. “If you know SQL, you can work with it.”
A biscuit cracker that survived the sinking of the Titanic has sold for £15,000 ($ 22,968) at auction in England and has been dubbed the ‘most valuable biscuit in the world.’
The plain cracker, sold by Henry Aldridge & Son auctioneers in Devizes in Wiltshire, fetched 5,000 ($ 7656) more than was expected.It was bought by a collector in Greece, the BBC reported.
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge told The Salisbury Journal: ‘It is the world’s most valuable biscuit. We don’t know which lifeboat the biscuit came from but there are no other Titanic lifeboat biscuits in existence to my knowledge.’
A biscuit that survived the sinking of the Titanic has sold for £15,000 ($ 22,968) at auction in England.
The Spillers and Bakers ‘Pilot’ biscuit survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 in which over 1,500 people died.
The plain biscuit was sold by Henry Aldridge & Son auctioneers in Devizes in Wiltshire and fetched 5,000 ($ 7656) more than was expected
The Spillers and Bakers ‘Pilot’ biscuit survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 in which over 1,500 people died after the ‘unsinkable’ ship hit an iceberg.
According to auctioneers, the sweet was part of a survival kit that was stored within one of the ill-fated ocean liner’s lifeboats.
James Fenwick, a passenger onboard the SS Carpathia, which went to the aid of survivors from the ship kept it as a ‘souvenir’ of the disaster.
He put the snack in a Kodak photographic envelope and wrote a note which stated ‘Pilot biscuit from Titanic lifeboat April 1912’.
Aldridge added: ‘It is incredible that this biscuit has survived such a dramatic event – the sinking of the world’s largest ocean liner – costing 1,500 lives.
‘In terms of precedence, a few years ago a biscuit from one of Shackleton’s expeditions sold for about £3,000 ($ 4,593) and there is a biscuit from the Lusitania in a museum in the Republic of Ireland.
‘So we have put an estimate of between £8,000 ($ 12,259) and £10,000 ($ 15,312) which makes it the most valuable biscuit in the world.’
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Last week, plans were announced for Accel-KKR to acquire not only Ektron, a Web content management software provider based in Nashua, N.H., but also EPiServer, another WCM software product which is based in Stockholm, Sweden. Accel-KKR is a private equity firm in Menlo Park, Calif.
Ektron and EpiServer are both Web content management products, overlapping in their functionality. Both products help companies publish digital content on their websites. Ektron customers include Microsoft, Nasdaq and Walmart. EpiServer customers include Pizza Hut, GlaxoSmithKline and British Telecom.
The WCM software market is highly overlapping and fragmented.
According to some industry watchers, the product overlap might involve a merging of the two platforms. Ron Miller of TechCrunch noted that EPiServer is often characterized as a superior product technically, but that Ektron has a leg up in terms of sales and marketing — as well as a greater toehold in U.S. markets.
Other industry experts have said that any merger between the two seems unlikely, other than to fill gaps in each company’s regional market foothold. It’s entirely likely, wrote Scott Liewehr of the Digital Clarity Group in a blog, that Accel-KKR would continue to support both.
Industry watchers were initially confused by news about the Ektron sale, with president Tim McKinnon saying Friday, Dec. 5, that there was no sale, only investment from Accel-KKR, nor a merger with EPiServer. Later, however, he was forced to adjust his statements after a document was released online indicating Ektron has been sold.
The WCM software market is highly overlapping and fragmented, with several vendors competing on customer turf for a highly commoditized set of services. Ektron has several competitors in the market, including Oracle, Sitecore, Adobe and OpenText, among others.
